


claw my eyes, skin my face, beg somehow to be replaced

by the merienes tranch (lilhalphys)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Internal Monologue, Metaphors, Scars, hints at beauyasha kinda, liberal use of metaphors, waxing poetic about scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 17:28:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19931797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilhalphys/pseuds/the%20merienes%20tranch
Summary: Beau knows a lot about fighting. With her fists, with her maneuvers.Beau knows a lot about fighting, about hurting people. She has cracked ribs and shattered spines and smashed teeth and left all sorts of bruises. But rarely scars.Beau is bo is not bow is not blade.or, Beau ruminates on scars and on sounds





	claw my eyes, skin my face, beg somehow to be replaced

**Author's Note:**

> i love beau. and every waking moment (usually between the hours of 10pm thursday and 2am friday est) i grow ever more worried about her. i pray every day for laura bailey to have jester hug her more. she needs it. please enjoy the written culmination of these feelings!

Beau knows a lot about fighting. With her fists, with her maneuvers, with her - not patience, but something like it. A sort of anticipation, a smug sureness that just a moment’s pause, a second’s waiting will give her the opportunity to gleefully sink her knuckles like so many teeth into ribs, a throat, the side of a jaw. It is less like patience and more like rhythm, like a musician with perfect pitch, the notes and chords singing through her muscles and bones like a beautiful girl’s laughter. She plants her feet into the dirt, shifts her weight, swings a fist, another, all along with the melody ingrained in her core. The Cobalt Soul may have finely tuned her, but the noise, the raw song of fight has always existed within her. 

Beau knows a lot about fighting, about violence, about victory, about Victoria, kissing her in back alleys, her run-tired legs humming with the thrill of the escape, of that whispered song. 

Beau knows a lot about fighting, about hurting people. She has cracked ribs and shattered spines and smashed teeth and left all sorts of bruises. But rarely scars. Beau is bo is not bow is not blade. 

But Beau sees scars. Yasha, like a Tal’dorei town on Winter’s Crest, is frankly decorated with them, the lot of them littered up and down her body like a story in Celestial, like Beau was an idiot for learning fucking Deep Speech instead, goddamnit. Sometimes in the low light of the fire, of the Tiny Hut, they seem to glow, like shards of glass, like holy blessings, like flowers, like Yasha’s eyes. And when she swings one of her giant swords around, the scars seem to dance, in sync with Beau’s own melody but sadder, more reluctant. Like they aren’t from blades at all, like they know.

And then there’s Fjord and his fewer, deeper scars. The ones on his arms, on his head he wears like badges, like intimidation, like everything but pity. The ones around his jaw are shorter, uneven, left by hands that Beau knows secondhand, knows from experience were smaller, shaking, scared. Lonely. He hides the others. Beau hasn’t seen them, doesn’t know about them, but feels them there like being watched, hears them hum, quiet, repressed under layers of leather and ice and salt.

And bo is not bow is not blade is not book.

Beau knows a lot about fighting, but not with magic. There’s legends of old, powerful wizards raining hell upon the world, calling down the rapture from an old book, used to be for their mothers’ bread recipes. Beau unceremoniously holds Frumpkin, looks him in the eye, and decides magic leaves scars too.

She hasn’t known Caduceus long enough to know about any of his scars. He gives off an impression like he doesn’t have any, impenetrable like stone and malleable like a corpse after a few days, a few moments under his care. The air about him almost buzzes with it, his own, foreign melody, or maybe that’s just the beetles that live in his staff, under his skin. A selfish part of her is jealous, wishes she could shove some of her pain onto someone like him who could handle it better, wishes to throw a tantrum sometimes. 

Then Jester, little lumps on her knuckles from poorly handled baking tins, never quite healed from her inexperience with Cure Wounds then, and she hasn’t had time for much baking since. Her every step resounds through the earth, thrumming and overpowering the battlefield with her saccharine percussion, but her song is not her own. The song is just as cheerful, bubbly and unnerving and you’d expect, but the melody comes from somewhere else, Jester only harmonizing. She doesn’t sleep on her left side anymore, Beau noticies, since she was almost vanquished by the only thing in the world more blue and louder than she is, since no amount of experience with Cure Wounds would make a gash like that heal any better, like cotton candy melted and distorted in the rain. She doesn’t complain, and Beau decides that that’s a different kind of scar. 

And then Nott, with skin made of arcane scar tissue. And Beau wishes she was a no more than a victim of circumstance, wishes she didn’t have to think about the unfairness, of being killed for being a good mother. Beau can’t fathom it, the idea of her mother or father being willing to suffer, to die for her. Nott just wants her child, and Beau just wants something else, and she doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t really want what she’d be asking for, but a part of her wonders, maybe. She doesn’t see Nott fight much, hears her only in silence punctuated by orchestral hits and shitty one liners. Not so much love to it, and Beau’d drink to that, but it feels impolite. Feels insensitive. 

And Caleb, ever Nott’s perfect pair, keeps all his scars inside, under wraps until he can’t anymore, like stomping out a campfire, like smothering a rogue blaze. And maybe that’s why Beau feels enough connection to build her walls up next to his, not quite touching, but closer than most. Close enough that she can reach out, and he can reach out, and they can pass notes across the gaps. Or books. Or cats. She doesn’t think that they could quite touch hands, but they rarely ever reach out at the same time, and when they do, they’re on opposite sides of their fortresses, miles apart. He’s like Nott, again, with big explosions, but he’s always rumbling, like purring, like smoldering, like he’s about to explode without any rhythm or melody about him.

And then there’s the unromantic truth about scars. They aren’t proof of shit, other than suffering, other than a permanent reminder than you got hurt bad enough that everyone else has to know. She wants to think of scars like mementos, something like a warning sign, something like a cry for help, but the person she knows with the most exists only in her pocket, tied up in her hair, still harmonizing alongside her, still just as off key, his scars the least romanticized thing about him. The bastard.

Beau doesn’t know anything about fighting, not really. She hits things with her staff good, she punches great, but she doesn’t know anything about wars, about dying, about not dying when you really should have, about someone else dying when it could have been you, maybe should have been. She doesn’t know anything about scars. She doesn’t know how to deal with them, wishes they weren’t real, wishes no one could see them, that she couldn’t see anyone else’s, feel the phantom pain of water in her lungs, blades behind her teeth, digging into her arms, into her sides.

So Beau is bo, leaves bruises not scars, breathes. Sings. 


End file.
